Market Report: Corn and Beans Higher Monday

It was a pretty good day for corn Monday given the sell-off late last week. While corn did close 3-8 cents off the highs, it was still up 5-9 cents. The Dollar Index was trading lower, and that supported all the grains. There was some thought that the corn losses were overdone late last week. There was also some talk about the USDA announcement that Brazil purchased 136,000 MT of U.S. corn. That was the first time in about 20 years that Brazil bought corn from the U.S. There has been speculation for quite a while that Brazil had committed more corn for export than they had.

Beans were under pressure in the overnight session, traded about 30 cents higher during the day session, eventually closing 13-15 cents higher. Bean traders may have been thinking the losses last week were overdone too and some bargain hunters showed up. The weather is supposed to dry out in Argentina to allow harvest to resume. It will likely be a while before we know just how much damage was done to their bean crop. I have seen estimates from 3 MMT to 10 MMT were lost. A 10 MMT loss would be about 400,000 million bushels of beans. That would change the world bean carryover balance sheet in a big way!